Monthly Archives: April 2011

Found out at the last minute that I’ll be perform­ing live on today’s WNYC Sound­check with John Schaefer. You can listen at 2:00 PM on 93.9 FM in the NYC area, or listen online here. Preced­ing me is an up-and-coming young composer by the name of Steve Reich.

I couldn’t make it to the LCD Soundsys­tem Lebewohl show at Madison Square Garden last night, neither could I watch the webcast. Right now, in fact, I’m sitting in the South­west terminal at Houston Hobby, waiting for the early flight back to LGA because some of us just can’t keep our roofs on.

Twitter is great in these inde­ter­mi­nate waiting periods that occupy a great deal of one’s life. Except nobody I know is tweeting at this hour, except for Erik Spiek­er­mann. Somehow I stumbled on the #LCDMSG tag, which people have cleverly used to mark their tweets relating to the afore­men­tioned LCD Soundsys­tem concert. This as-it-happens crowd­sourc­ing is one of the things Twitter is supposed to be used for, and about which much self-congrat­u­la­tory nonsense has been spouted (along the lines of, “Who needs a $450/year NYT subscrip­tion when we can watch events unfold on Twitter?”)

In reality, Twitter falls laugh­ably short. I tapped on #LCDMSG and found about three things, tweeted and re-tweeted in a never-ending feedback loop: “OMG #LCDMSG was soooo awesome” (wow, you should be a music critic), some­thing about a person called Patrick Ewing about which I do not care and which may or may not be a joke, and finally, messages from spam-bots which had nothing whatever to do with LCD or MSG but noticed that it was a popular tag and wanted (if spam-bots are capable of want) to sell Viagra to people.

I know for certain of one friend who was in atten­dance, and I’ll be inter­ested to talk about the show when I next see him (he wasn’t consid­er­ate enough to tweet; how rude). That’s the conun­drum; I’m not too inter­ested in the subjec­tive expe­ri­ences of strangers, even if the expe­ri­ences them­selves are ones I’m inter­ested in. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the entire “hashtag” feature is pretty useless; most of my friends subvert the tags into a self-conscious form of parody, using them to edito­ri­al­ize their own thoughts in ways that, though often clever and funny, would be prepos­ter­ous to search for.

Of course, humor is the saving grace of Twitter, that perfectly flippant medium.